Sorry to say it guys, but this is a repeat of an old Slashdot post that linked to an ArsTechnica article more than a year old.
Still though, after having to wallow through Cringley's painful lack of comprehension of basic technical knowledge, reading the ArsTechnica piece again was quite refreshing.
He doesn't even need to slip down any more chimmneys and risk getting stuck (or burned).
Heh, reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes comic where Calvin walks in on a roaring fireplace and douses it with a fire extinguisher screaming "WHAT'S THIS? SANTA FLAMBE?!"
That, and I wonder what happens to TV reception in the area once they plug that sucker in? I only have 2 strands on my tree and the cable guy told me today that that's what's been screwing up the picture.
As you can tell by reading the article, and as you certainly wouldn't be led to believe by reading CmdrTaco's summary, they are refusing to shut down in order to comply with a previous court order. This is more a case of conflicting orders in the judicial system than anything else.
I'm appalled that our government would waste so much money on something that could easily be done in the private sector. In fact, the last time I heard, they were actively competing with a private sector team in order to see who would first decode the human genome.
Come on, the only thing worse than being patented by a private corporation is being patented by your government. Either way, they'll own the rights to our genetic patterns, but in one instance I'll end up with a tax cut that gives me enough money to move to a country that ignores patent laws, while in the other my government throws away my money competing competing with the private sector. The government should never be competing with the private sector.
...Although it seems to be lacking in some areas. Would you care to post a big announcement the next time a security flaw is found in a Linux distribution or any of the myriad of software that is usually bundled with one?
Perhaps you guys could mirror Bugtraq too? I'd really appreciate it. Thanx.
I know that all of this evangelizing to get Free Software into schools is well-intentioned, but I can't help but wonder if we are doing more harm than good. Sure, the software that these people want to provide to school districts comes at zero initial cost, but what happens when something goes wrong? What if the mail server is misconfigured and starts causing problems later on? What if they get hacked (certainly not improbable with an abundance of hacker-familiar Linux machines on the network)?
Does anyone know what the support costs will be once this school runs into the inevitable problems imposed by either poor configuration by hobbyists or the need to scale? What if they need more email accounts or something? While these problems would be easily dealt with on a Windows-based network (I think even your average high school computer teacher could handle it, or, barring that, a couple of MCSEs, who are a dime a dozen these days), it has been proven that there is a chronic shortage of people who are Linux-competent. This mostly stems from the fact that Linux is much less common than Windows in today's business world, so naturally there is a labor shortage. Any causal student of economics knows that a shortage in labor leads to skyrocketing salaries and consulting fees when it comes time to fix problems, money that a school district simply can't spend on expensive tech support.
Really, when it comes down to it, you have to look at the total cost of ownership associated with installing a certain platform at a school. While the initial cost of a Windows site license may be high, it is a lot cheaper to maintain overall due to the abundance of people who can fix problems for a relatively low fee. Compare this with Linux, where whole companies base their business plans on providing support for an arcane system that can often suffer failures. In the end, perhaps these evangelization efforts would be better spent on coding software that makes Linux more user-friendly and less of a hobbyist's toy.
I think I could speak for many people when I say that using Linux along with other free tools like gcc is one of the best things that a developer can do. I personally use RedHat at my job as a developer, along with the whole development team, while most of the rest of the company uses Windows. You just get more done in Linux if you're programming.
However, I think it would be wrong to try to foist Free Software upon unwitting schools before they knew what they were getting into. There is a very important reason that Linux has stayed at about.25% of desktop market share: it makes a crappy end-user desktop. Sure, you can use it on your network servers for Samba and mail and the like, but I would hesitate to train children on a system that will be ultimately useless to them when they get out into a world dominated by Microsoft software. Because, like it or not, high school is, for most, valuable job training before they leave high school and enter the work force, be that as secretaries using MS Office or accountants using Excel, etc. When you teach them to use software that is completely irrelevant outside of school, you are crippling them for life as they have to retrain themselves on all the applications that school had taught them in order to use something as commonplace as Office.
Not to mention the numerous administration headaches that would result from your everyday highschool computer teacher trying to figure out Linux, let alone teach it. I personally could not imagine my glorified typing teacher in high school comprehending file permissions, much less understanding something as arcane as TeX or vi.
All in all, its probably a better idea to stick with something like Macs which have a proven track record in education as well as most of the common office applications that can be found on Windows computers as well. Free Software has its place, but it certainly isn't on the desktop.
Well, at least as far as fixed wireless access is concerned. Last time I checked, my local provider offered some pretty pretty cheap rates for synchronous 2 Mbps service. Hell of a lot cheaper than a T-1, that's for sure.
Jeez, if getting a fast update is such a problem, just establish a network of mirrors to solve the problem.
Ximian is just another classic case of "too little, too late." How do they expect to make money through offering "faster" updates if anyone could just download the freely available updates and then mirror them on a high-bandwidth connection? I mean, it's already been established that people are benevolent with their bandwidth (just look at all the other Free Software mirrors), so why wouldn't they do this with Ximian?
I suppose Ximian's business strategy could best be summed up as "give everything away for free and hope the investors don't notice."
...for another 14 years of unreadable, unmaintainable crappiness! Let's hear it for Perl!
Time to revise the overclockers manual
on
Swaying CPU Fans
·
· Score: 1
This is just an excuse for designers to make CPU's less efficent and more power hungry.
Imagine...
Washington Post: Dec 13, 2018. Details are now emerging about the accident that irradiated much of Germany on Tuesday. Nothing is as yet confirmed, however, initial reports indicate that a heatsink was somehow removed from an AMD processor (PR rating 10,000,000). A bizzare terrorist group with the initials THG may have been involved. Containment was lost, and critical mass was reached almost immediately. AMD representatives have issued a statement in the wake of the carnage: "Obviously, they were using an improperly designed motherboard."
We finished
product development almost a year ago and have a really great
portable video codec that runs on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows.
If this is what you call "cross-platform", then it is no wonder that people pulled investment money out of your company and left you ultimately failing. You are leaving great media platforms like BeOS out in the cold, not to mention virtually all of the *BSDs. And what about IRIX? Solaris? AIX? Last I heard, they had quite a market share among commercial UNIX platforms.
Thus, I think that the best direction that your project could possibly take would be to GPL all of your work. Regardless of whether people muck it up with their own ill-advised "improvements", there will always be the original code available to anyone interested, so that others may port it to other platforms. Otherwise, all you have is another Quicktime: Good codec, absolutely worthless for cross-platform viewing.
If you are telecommuting to your business, then perhaps you should be honest and start paying them for business-class service. After all, I doubt your business involves playing UT and downloading pr0n all day.
Seriously, who here runs a VPN that doesn't connect to their office? I can't really see a use for a VPN besides connecting widely distributed corporate offices and internal networks, which is most certainly deserving of business-class rates.
I find it intriguing that many of the people here, most of whom are probably systems administrators or other technology-centric people in their respective corporations, are willing to unquestionably trust the security of open source software, even though, for the vast majority of them, the extent of their interaction with the code is
./configure
make
make install
with few, if any of them, actually auditing the code for security holes before installing it to protect their mission-critical data.
In my 20 years of experience as a systems programmer, I am well-versed in the idea that it is much easier to throw out the existing code base and start from scratch rather than wasting time on trying to fix horribly flawed or poorly documented code that can be millions of lines long. Therefore, it should not come as much of a surprise that the security-conscious agencies in the federal government (CIA, NSA, DIA, Dept. of Commerce, etc.) largely write their own software inhouse rather than rely on fixing up something like Linux and hoping that they caught all the bugs. I mean, really folks, let's face it: Linux was designed by many people in a chaotic manner, and rarely were the features implemented with security at the top of their priorities.
So while it is all well and good that Guardent is trying to sell free software to enterprise customers, I can certainly see why major corporations would be hesitant to trust their security to messy open source software. Besides the fact that most of the biggest customers of closed source software vendors get to see the sourcecode for review anyway, because they are paying so much money for support, etc.
I'm sorry, but I draw the "geekiness" line at pissing away your time writing silly crap like that for a calculator. A calculator is a tool of science and business, not a gaming machine. I cannot begin to describe the problems that it has caused me as a high-school math teacher. Not only has the rampant Tetris-playing caused my students to stop paying attention in class, but the ability to store "notes" in the calculator is a major source of cheating on tests. It has gotten so far that we have had to require that only scientific calculators be used on the upcoming midterm exams.
On an unrelated note, why don't you write about HP calculators some time? They are far superior from a technological and software standpoint, and RPN works a lot better than standard algebraic notation. Alas, I suppose now that HP's discontinuing them, they don't matter to the Slashdot crowd anymore...
This is certainly an astounding development in the field of photonics. Maybe now we can all get rid of programs like PGP that leave us vulnerable to government backdoors and move to some real encryption. Quantum encryption, by its very nature, is unbreakable. I thought that I would barely live to see its advent, but now with this it looks like it could be just around the corner.
However, one has to wonder what kind of restrictions that will be placed on this. What would you be able to do with unbreakable encryption? Share information on human rights abuses with your friends? How about plan the destruction of a high-profile government building?
The point is, it's time to show a little responsibility in the academic community. Just like the scientists who go ahead with playing God with stem cells before the ethical ramifications have been fully explored, these researchers have unleashed an unholy nightmare on the world that won't be fully realized until it's too late. It's bad enough that al-Qaida used GPG to communicate and coordinate their plans to commit atrocities agianst the US, but how much safer would you feel knowing that now not even the NSA can decypher their communications? Or even intercept them? It sets a dangerous precedent, and I think they ought to fully understand what they are bringing about before they actually release a prototype.
I'm sorry, but I have a real bone to pick when it comes to desktop usability on Linux. First of all, my biggest complaint is that KDE (the one that comes with SuSE 7.2) is incredibly unstable. I mean, I installed it to get away from the occasional crashes in Windows 98 SE, but as it ends up, I spend more time restarting the X server or killing crashed apps than I do getting any real work done.
Secondly, what in the world is keeping them from creating a universal clipboard buffer with cut'n'paste functions? I mean, I'm sure that there are messy hacks out there somewhere to give KDE that functionality, but, quite frankly, I shouldn't have to do that with my desktop. Why not? Because Windows (and all Windows applications) support a global clipboard buffer. Which is no trivial feature when you are playing around with PHP and HTML code.
Until KDE can become more stable than Windows and eliminate some of its really stupid idiosynchrosies, I think I'll stick with Windows when I want to get all my work done.
There is only one Linux kernel, which seems to progress just fine without another competing project nipping at its feet and instigating flamewars.
This is patently untrue. The Linux kernel is in constant competition with a myriad of other open systems out there, such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and SCO OpenServer. What is going on just happens to be on a much wider field than piddly desktop environments.
For example, there have been endless flamewars over FreeBSD's superior VM or Linux's POSIX compliance. In the end, you just have to realize that there are operating systems that are specialized in certain areas. Use the best tool for the job. If you happen to run a high-traffic Internet portal, then FreeBSD is certainly your ideal system. If you are the artistic type and enjoy dabbling in the GIMP or running your own mail server for your home network, then Linux is definitely the right tool for the job.
None of this specialization would have been possible if these other systems hadn't existed. Competition is the mother of invention, contrary to the popular proverb, and I don't doubt for a minute that Linus et al. would be resting on their laurels contemplating the wonders of FAT32 if it hadn't been for the fierce competition.
While I realize that it was probably the most obvious choice, couldn't they do better for signatures than using a hash? If the spammer changes just one character in each spam he sends out (say he puts a unique junk string on the end of each message), the system is totally defeated.
A better system would be to take random samples of several line groups, and then write a "signature" with the line numbers and the contents next to them. Then, if by some stroke of chance, the spammers random string is contained in one of those samples, one could do a diff between a message and the signature, and if it was pretty close, then it would still count as a match.
Well, I'm off to their project page on Sourceforge...
Please, in these times of terrorists sending anthrax through the US Postal system, it is considered at least poor taste to joke about game developers being hit by biological warfare.
I'm posting from a Comcast connection right now, and I've heard various unconfirmed reports that Comcast has been frantically preparing their own backbone network over the past few weeks in preparation for exactly this kind of scenario.
The only thing I'm really worried about right now is losing my e-mail account and having friends get their messages bounced before I can tell them my new address (whatever that may be). It's almost as bad as going through a change of area code with the phone company, only here, the grace period is a matter of days.
Slashdot Mirror
Hot damn! Imma gonna build me the first ever first post machine! Lookout cyborg_monkey, make way for sdem!
Still though, after having to wallow through Cringley's painful lack of comprehension of basic technical knowledge, reading the ArsTechnica piece again was quite refreshing.
Heh, reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes comic where Calvin walks in on a roaring fireplace and douses it with a fire extinguisher screaming "WHAT'S THIS? SANTA FLAMBE?!"
I'll never stop refreshing Slashdot again! I can't allow this to happen a second time!
That, and I wonder what happens to TV reception in the area once they plug that sucker in? I only have 2 strands on my tree and the cable guy told me today that that's what's been screwing up the picture.
As you can tell by reading the article, and as you certainly wouldn't be led to believe by reading CmdrTaco's summary, they are refusing to shut down in order to comply with a previous court order. This is more a case of conflicting orders in the judicial system than anything else.
Come on, the only thing worse than being patented by a private corporation is being patented by your government. Either way, they'll own the rights to our genetic patterns, but in one instance I'll end up with a tax cut that gives me enough money to move to a country that ignores patent laws, while in the other my government throws away my money competing competing with the private sector. The government should never be competing with the private sector.
Perhaps you guys could mirror Bugtraq too? I'd really appreciate it. Thanx.
Does anyone know what the support costs will be once this school runs into the inevitable problems imposed by either poor configuration by hobbyists or the need to scale? What if they need more email accounts or something? While these problems would be easily dealt with on a Windows-based network (I think even your average high school computer teacher could handle it, or, barring that, a couple of MCSEs, who are a dime a dozen these days), it has been proven that there is a chronic shortage of people who are Linux-competent. This mostly stems from the fact that Linux is much less common than Windows in today's business world, so naturally there is a labor shortage. Any causal student of economics knows that a shortage in labor leads to skyrocketing salaries and consulting fees when it comes time to fix problems, money that a school district simply can't spend on expensive tech support.
Really, when it comes down to it, you have to look at the total cost of ownership associated with installing a certain platform at a school. While the initial cost of a Windows site license may be high, it is a lot cheaper to maintain overall due to the abundance of people who can fix problems for a relatively low fee. Compare this with Linux, where whole companies base their business plans on providing support for an arcane system that can often suffer failures. In the end, perhaps these evangelization efforts would be better spent on coding software that makes Linux more user-friendly and less of a hobbyist's toy.
However, I think it would be wrong to try to foist Free Software upon unwitting schools before they knew what they were getting into. There is a very important reason that Linux has stayed at about .25% of desktop market share: it makes a crappy end-user desktop. Sure, you can use it on your network servers for Samba and mail and the like, but I would hesitate to train children on a system that will be ultimately useless to them when they get out into a world dominated by Microsoft software. Because, like it or not, high school is, for most, valuable job training before they leave high school and enter the work force, be that as secretaries using MS Office or accountants using Excel, etc. When you teach them to use software that is completely irrelevant outside of school, you are crippling them for life as they have to retrain themselves on all the applications that school had taught them in order to use something as commonplace as Office.
Not to mention the numerous administration headaches that would result from your everyday highschool computer teacher trying to figure out Linux, let alone teach it. I personally could not imagine my glorified typing teacher in high school comprehending file permissions, much less understanding something as arcane as TeX or vi.
All in all, its probably a better idea to stick with something like Macs which have a proven track record in education as well as most of the common office applications that can be found on Windows computers as well. Free Software has its place, but it certainly isn't on the desktop.
Well, at least as far as fixed wireless access is concerned. Last time I checked, my local provider offered some pretty pretty cheap rates for synchronous 2 Mbps service. Hell of a lot cheaper than a T-1, that's for sure.
Ximian is just another classic case of "too little, too late." How do they expect to make money through offering "faster" updates if anyone could just download the freely available updates and then mirror them on a high-bandwidth connection? I mean, it's already been established that people are benevolent with their bandwidth (just look at all the other Free Software mirrors), so why wouldn't they do this with Ximian?
I suppose Ximian's business strategy could best be summed up as "give everything away for free and hope the investors don't notice."
For the sake of someone who couldn't pass 3rd grade spelling or grammar, I sure hope you aren't in the market for an expensive new grapics card...
...for another 14 years of unreadable, unmaintainable crappiness! Let's hear it for Perl!
Imagine...
Washington Post: Dec 13, 2018. Details are now emerging about the accident that irradiated much of Germany on Tuesday. Nothing is as yet confirmed, however, initial reports indicate that a heatsink was somehow removed from an AMD processor (PR rating 10,000,000). A bizzare terrorist group with the initials THG may have been involved. Containment was lost, and critical mass was reached almost immediately. AMD representatives have issued a statement in the wake of the carnage: "Obviously, they were using an improperly designed motherboard."
We finished product development almost a year ago and have a really great portable video codec that runs on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows.
If this is what you call "cross-platform", then it is no wonder that people pulled investment money out of your company and left you ultimately failing. You are leaving great media platforms like BeOS out in the cold, not to mention virtually all of the *BSDs. And what about IRIX? Solaris? AIX? Last I heard, they had quite a market share among commercial UNIX platforms.
Thus, I think that the best direction that your project could possibly take would be to GPL all of your work. Regardless of whether people muck it up with their own ill-advised "improvements", there will always be the original code available to anyone interested, so that others may port it to other platforms. Otherwise, all you have is another Quicktime: Good codec, absolutely worthless for cross-platform viewing.
Seriously, who here runs a VPN that doesn't connect to their office? I can't really see a use for a VPN besides connecting widely distributed corporate offices and internal networks, which is most certainly deserving of business-class rates.
with few, if any of them, actually auditing the code for security holes before installing it to protect their mission-critical data.
In my 20 years of experience as a systems programmer, I am well-versed in the idea that it is much easier to throw out the existing code base and start from scratch rather than wasting time on trying to fix horribly flawed or poorly documented code that can be millions of lines long. Therefore, it should not come as much of a surprise that the security-conscious agencies in the federal government (CIA, NSA, DIA, Dept. of Commerce, etc.) largely write their own software inhouse rather than rely on fixing up something like Linux and hoping that they caught all the bugs. I mean, really folks, let's face it: Linux was designed by many people in a chaotic manner, and rarely were the features implemented with security at the top of their priorities.
So while it is all well and good that Guardent is trying to sell free software to enterprise customers, I can certainly see why major corporations would be hesitant to trust their security to messy open source software. Besides the fact that most of the biggest customers of closed source software vendors get to see the sourcecode for review anyway, because they are paying so much money for support, etc.
On an unrelated note, why don't you write about HP calculators some time? They are far superior from a technological and software standpoint, and RPN works a lot better than standard algebraic notation. Alas, I suppose now that HP's discontinuing them, they don't matter to the Slashdot crowd anymore...
However, one has to wonder what kind of restrictions that will be placed on this. What would you be able to do with unbreakable encryption? Share information on human rights abuses with your friends? How about plan the destruction of a high-profile government building?
The point is, it's time to show a little responsibility in the academic community. Just like the scientists who go ahead with playing God with stem cells before the ethical ramifications have been fully explored, these researchers have unleashed an unholy nightmare on the world that won't be fully realized until it's too late. It's bad enough that al-Qaida used GPG to communicate and coordinate their plans to commit atrocities agianst the US, but how much safer would you feel knowing that now not even the NSA can decypher their communications? Or even intercept them? It sets a dangerous precedent, and I think they ought to fully understand what they are bringing about before they actually release a prototype.
Secondly, what in the world is keeping them from creating a universal clipboard buffer with cut'n'paste functions? I mean, I'm sure that there are messy hacks out there somewhere to give KDE that functionality, but, quite frankly, I shouldn't have to do that with my desktop. Why not? Because Windows (and all Windows applications) support a global clipboard buffer. Which is no trivial feature when you are playing around with PHP and HTML code.
Until KDE can become more stable than Windows and eliminate some of its really stupid idiosynchrosies, I think I'll stick with Windows when I want to get all my work done.
This is patently untrue. The Linux kernel is in constant competition with a myriad of other open systems out there, such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and SCO OpenServer. What is going on just happens to be on a much wider field than piddly desktop environments.
For example, there have been endless flamewars over FreeBSD's superior VM or Linux's POSIX compliance. In the end, you just have to realize that there are operating systems that are specialized in certain areas. Use the best tool for the job. If you happen to run a high-traffic Internet portal, then FreeBSD is certainly your ideal system. If you are the artistic type and enjoy dabbling in the GIMP or running your own mail server for your home network, then Linux is definitely the right tool for the job.
None of this specialization would have been possible if these other systems hadn't existed. Competition is the mother of invention, contrary to the popular proverb, and I don't doubt for a minute that Linus et al. would be resting on their laurels contemplating the wonders of FAT32 if it hadn't been for the fierce competition.
A better system would be to take random samples of several line groups, and then write a "signature" with the line numbers and the contents next to them. Then, if by some stroke of chance, the spammers random string is contained in one of those samples, one could do a diff between a message and the signature, and if it was pretty close, then it would still count as a match.
Well, I'm off to their project page on Sourceforge...
Please, in these times of terrorists sending anthrax through the US Postal system, it is considered at least poor taste to joke about game developers being hit by biological warfare.
The only thing I'm really worried about right now is losing my e-mail account and having friends get their messages bounced before I can tell them my new address (whatever that may be). It's almost as bad as going through a change of area code with the phone company, only here, the grace period is a matter of days.